Palestine: A Chicano’s Education Or How I Decided to Educate Myself on Zionism, part 3: The Lions Expose the Hunters

 Palestine:

A Chicano’s Education

Or

How I Decided to Educate Myself on Zionism, part 3:

The Lions Expose the Hunters

 

When People Are Colonized Resistance Is Justified

Free, Free Palestine! Free, Free Palestine!

¡Viva! ¡Viva! ¡Palestina! ¡Viva! ¡Viva! ¡Palestina!

Aaron Bushnell, You Are Not Alone!

Biden, Biden, You’re A Liar—We Demand a Cease Fire!

Biden, Biden, You’re A Liar—We Demand a Cease Fire!

We Are All Palestinians. We Are All Palestinians.

(Peoples’ slogans at Chiques demonstration as part of a worldwide day of action, Sunday, March 2, 2024)

 

On Sunday, March 2, 2024, a worldwide day of action, thousands, if not millions, of people from all walks of life took to the streets across the land, again, to protest the United States government-backed Israeli Defense Forces’ inexorably merciless massacre, starvation, oppression, and overall genocide of the people of Palestine.

Before marching through the streets of Third, C, Second, Oxnard Boulevard, Seventh, and A, a multiracial mass of one thousand gente assembled at the city hall of Chiques (aka, Oxnard) to condemn President Joe Biden, Senator Alex Padilla, Congresswoman Julia Brownley, and Oxnard Councilwoman Gabriela Basua, and Oxnard Mayor John Zaragoza by name for their complicity and support for the Zionist murder of the people of Palestine for not demanding that the state of Israel agree to a permanent cease-fire on Gaza. The people inveighed the US government’s enablement of Israel’s acts of genocide in the Gaza Strip as charged in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) by South Africa.

According to REUTERS, on January 26, 2024, the ICJ found that "At least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the (Genocide) Convention."

Democratic functionaries of empire yet continue to asininely recite

“Israel has the right to defend itself.”

¡Sin vergüenza!

 

Sunday, February 25, 2024, in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC Airman Aaron Bushnell protested by self-immolation the US government’s sponsorship of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.

Before Aaron Bushnell live streamed his suicide by fire, he stated "I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

Like former Army Private First Class Chelsea Manning who witnessed with horror a US military Apache helicopter killing innocent Iraqi civilians and other atrocities that our censored media does not allow the public to see, I imagine Aaron Bushnell viewed or knew of similar atrocities by the US government.

Over the years, I have both directly and indirectly known people with US security clearance allude to witnessing our government commit inhuman acts of violence against civilians in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ask a veteran.

 

****

 

 

For decades the state of Israel dominated the narrative on the question of Palestine; complemented by US State Department and corporate media propaganda, of course. As the Middle East hegemon, the state of Israel assiduously defines, with US assistance, the present and past to chart the future. In 1958, the great Nigerian storyteller Chinua Achebe published the exquisite novel Things Fall Apart which critiqued not only the British empire’s brutal colonization—if there were any other kind—of his homeland but also all of Africa by other European imperialists. As I studied Things Fall Apart after I listened to an obituary of Achebe’s life on public radio in 2013, I was reminded of what my mentor-teacher professed when I was a Fresno State undergrad: Christian missionaries are the advanced guard of any imperial invasion; after which, well, things fall apart.

Achebe also understood that the violently mighty, conqueror-oppressors and alike define the past in which the present is comprehended. To counter the myths, half-truths, and the downright mentiras of settler colonial empires around the globe like the US, Britain, France, Germany, and Israel, Achebe encouraged counter-hegemonic storytelling in writing:

There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions.

Via history, art, music, poetry, dance, novels, film: We Must Dare To Be Lions.

As the governments of the Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, and Israel, are historical hunters, I view Vine Deloria as one lion, among many, that narrated the story of the US government’s hunt in North America in his germinal, must-read book to appreciate the essence of American history, Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969). With US congressional documentation, Deloria researched a chilling history detailing the hunt of the US Army that methodically murdered, ethnically cleansed, and drove out Native Americans from their homeland for the Ingalls family to settle as Zionists do in Palestine. So, Zionists are using the US’s playbook of settler colonial occupation and conquest. In the February 26, 2024 online edition of The New Yorker, Shane Bauer, in an article titled “The Israeli Settlers Attacking Their Palestinian Neighbors, quotes Ory Shimon, a twenty-year old Westbank Israeli settler, expressing that “he felt that Israel was being unfairly scrutinized: ‘America came with ships and killed all the Indians and made them slaves. It’s terrible, but now America doesn’t’ say ‘We’re sorry, take the land back.” Furthermore, Bauer wrote the following regarding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich:

In 2017, he [Smotrich] published his “Decisive Plan” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first step, he wrote, was to make the “ambition for a Jewish State from the river to the sea . . . an accomplished fact” by “establishing new cities and settlements deep inside the territory and bringing hundreds of thousands of additional settlers to live there.” Once “victory by settlement” was accomplished, Smotrich continued, Palestinians would have two options: stay in Israel, without the right to vote in national elections, or emigrate. “Zionism,” he wrote, “was built based on population exchange e.g. the mass Aliyah of Jews from Arab countries and Europe to the Land of Israel, willingly or not, and the exit of masses of Arabs who lived here, willingly or not, to the surrounding Arab areas. This historic pattern seems to require culmination.”

 

Hence, according to Zionist, all of Palestine belongs to Israel. Drive out Palestinians to Syria, Jordan, and Egypt; conquer as much as land possible to keep forever. This permits us to comprehend cunning Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) atrocities that target journalists, doctors and nurses, refugees, and civilians in Gaza today.

The violent, steady, theft of land from the people of Palestine was not so linear after World War I as British hunters gained control of the region from the Ottomans with the League of Nations Mandate of 1918. As scrupulously accounted for by Daniel Yergin in The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, & Power (1991), capitalist geo-strategic points of Standard Oil and British Petroleum encouraged the European partition of the Middle East. Subsequently, to solidify its regional control, the British permitted Ashkenazi Zionist hunters access to Palestinian lands. But as Palestinian national liberationist leader Ghassan Kanafani details a good number of Palestinian elites rented and sold their real estate to Zionists and served as quislings for capo capitalists. Before this Jews, Muslims, and Christians of Palestine lived in peaceful harmony. This is according to Richard Becker, Jimmy Carter, Rashid Khalidi, Ilan Pappé, and other eminent writers. For a succinct summary of this history read Eric Mann’s February 22, 2024 essay in the LA Progressive.

Weaponizing the Holocaust, however, Zionists insist that Muslim leaders of the Middle East have forever been antagonistic to the existence of Jews and the state of Israel. As early as the late 1940s, nascent Arab states—essentially puppet governments created by imperialist Britain, France, and the US—in and out of the region of Palestine accepted the state of Israel’s existence as this is what the Western powers dictated. In 2017, even Hamas declared Israel’s existence based on 1967 borders. The myth of annihilation, however, benefits the state of Israel in terms of international sympathy and support, especially that of the US, as well as its ruthless illegal settlement and occupation in all of Palestine. Resistance and Palestinian counterattacks are then used as pretexts, to the max, by Zionists to go on the offensive to conquer the little remaining territory that Palestinians control ever so tenuously. Some call this cycle mowing the lawn. Ultimately, the hunters, the US and Israel, are mouthing a false history and gaslighting the public.

From my study of books and articles on the question of Palestine, Zionist leaders since the late nineteenth century have systematically worked to conquer all the land of Palestine to advance a purely Jewish state. Many people ignorant of this history, blame Palestinians for not agreeing to a two-state solution when it is Israel that has blocked this idea as it contravenes the Zionist mission to dominate all of Palestine. Furthermore, in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006),  President Jimmy Carter eloquently details how Israel has sophisticated control over diplomatic affairs and public relations systems, especially with US surrogates such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This is how Zionists of the state of Israel steadily violates with impunity United Nations:

• Resolution 181 of 1947 that partitioned Palestine into two states: Arab and Jewish. But as Britain planned its exit in 1947, Zionist terrorists, advised by the State of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and his Consultancy, accelerated the seizure of Palestinian lands in both territories. Thus, as resolutely described by Ilan Pappe in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007), Hagana, Qiryati, the Harel Brigade, Brigade Etzioni, Alexdroni Brigade, and other Zionist terrorist militias, before the formal creation of the IDF, executed Palestinian villagers in both the territories of Palestine and Israel, dynamited occupied homes, ethnically cleansed communities usually at the dead of night, and stole all their possessions.
• Resolution 194 of 1948 resolved that refugees of Nakba, the catastrophe of the Zionist killing and mass expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their lands, had the right to return to their homes, be compensated, and live in peace with their neighbors of all backgrounds—Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. The state of Israel contravenes UN Resolution 194 as it refuses to return occupied and stolen lands to Palestinians. In fact, before and since 1948, the state of Israel has driven Palestinians from lands partitioned to them under UN Resolution 181. Zionist utilizes scripture and the recent history of the Holocaust to shield them from any criticism. For Zionists such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there is “No such thing” as Palestinian people. All of Palestine is biblical deeded to Jews, according to Zionnists.
• Resolution 242 was adopted after the Six-Day War of 1967 and called for Israel to withdraw from the territories occupied during this conflict. Although it withdrew from the Sinai, Israelis continue to expand into, occupy, and settle upon Palestinian lands in the Golan Heights and the West Bank.

Despite the deceit of the US government and Israel, the lions of the world are roaring loud for a liberated Palestine. I am that historian, of many. Be a lion, too. Write, demonstrate, and demand from your government representatives (local, state, and federal) a Palestine where Arabs and Jews can coexist in harmony and peace as they did before the embarkation of Zionism.

Palestine: A Chicano’s Education Or How I Decided to Educate Myself on Zionism, part 2: Settler Colonialism as Zionism, And Vice Versa.

In line with the protocol of settler colonialism, since the late 19th century Zionist terrorist, mainly Jewish settlers escaping the vicious antisemitism of Europe, have systematically attacked Palestinians to occupy their lands.

But the state of Israel has the right to defend itself.

Jews comprised 5% of the population at the start of the Zionist settler colonial project. While 75% were Muslims and 20% were Christians living in well-nigh harmony in what is now Israeli-occupied Palestine.

Yet the state of Israel has the right to defend itself.

30,000 Palestinians (mostly civilian babies, children, women, and men) have died at the hands of Israeli settlers and the United States-backed Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in vengeance for the Hamas resistance of October 7th killing 1,200 people, and the taking of hostages.

However, the state of Israel has the right to defend itself.

The people of Palestine resist Israeli incursion, occupation, and oppression with rocks hurled by children, inaccurate and marginally effective rockets, and guerilla-style tactics against a vastly superior, regular IDF military equipped with state-of-the-art tanks, bulldozers, bombs, and jet fighters, many manufactured by US companies and subsidized by the United States.

Conversely, the state of Israel has the right to defend itself.

IDF wantonly bomb to rubble Palestinian hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, and camps in Gaza resulting in 1.4 million Palestinian refugees (67% of the total population) dying from exposure, starvation, wounds, and disease.

Still, the state of Israel has the right to defend itself.

The state of Israel commands and blockades roads, airspace, and waterways leading to the Palestinian territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and Golan Heights. Hence, Palestinians are at the complete mercy of their occupiers for food, fuel, medicine, and potable water to survive. Meanwhile, uniformed people continue to wonder why Palestinians, from the young and old, resist the oppression of the United States-backed IDF.
Again, Israel has the right to defend itself.

As written by President Jimmy Carter in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006), Palestinians live in an apartheid state in their territories and the state of Israel.

Israel has the right to defend itself, say President Joe Biden, my US Senators Alex Padilla and Laphonza Butler, and similar Zionist apologists in Washington, D.C.

To grasp the Question of Palestine, a person willing to learn must evaluate the historical nature of Zionism that laid the foundation for the creation of the apartheid state of Israel 76 years ago.

Austrian Theodore Herzl galvanized Zionism, the colonial settlement of Palestine by Ashkenazi Jews, principally, for his people to escape the virulence of antisemitism in central and eastern Europe. To define this movement, in 1896 he published “The Jewish State” and the next year organized the first Zionist congress. Zionism, however, must not be equated with Judaism, especially when one considers that Herzl was an atheist; especially as many non-Jews may conflate Zionism with Judaism. Nonetheless, as a settler colonial project, Zionism patterns itself after the merciless, capitalist schemes of Belgium, Britain, France, Spain, the United States, and other market-driven empires. Hence, let’s be clear that violence—that involves state terrorism and genocide—structurally undergirds empire. Always has and always will.

In 1923, Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky published two articles in the Ha’aretz newspaper that serve as the policy template of the state of Israel. Jabotinsky held that only a brutal “Iron Wall” could maintain and advance Israel’s settler colonial project; accordingly, the will and hope of Palestinians must be crushed. Journalist Richard Becker declared in Palestine: Israel, and the U.S. Empire (2009), “Jabotinsky continued his ‘honesty’ in a letter to Jewish lawyer and friend Oscar Grusenberg: ‘We Jews are Europeans…What do we have in common with the ‘Orient’? And everything in the Orient is doomed.” (36-37)

Despite written and cinematic portrayals that romanticize the oppressions of empire with gaudy uniforms, close-order parades accompanied by triumphal music, and the exhibition of formidable weaponry, the conquest of indigenous peoples—whether they be Palestinians, Native Americans, people of India, the Irish, or Africans of the Congo—stem from nation state-sanctioned military terror, torture, and the recruitment of indigenous quislings. Settler colonial aggressors then brand indigenous people who resist (i.e., fight back) and defend themselves—whether they be Palestinians or the Wampanoag of 17th century New England—savages, heathens, human animals, and terrorists. As propaganda and narrative domination are chief components of the machinery of empires. This is why US news from Palestine is censored by the state of Israel. In Gaza, journalists, especially Palestinian reporters, are assassinated by IDF snipers. But today social media reels of catastrophic civilian deaths and destruction, and Israeli hostages and civilian Palestinians waving white flags of surrender and peace killed by IDF snipers contest the state of Israel’s Iron Wall of censorship.

To sanction settler colonial projects, imperial governments also exploit religious myths and discourses to sanction violent occupations to achieve total domination. For example, in the case of Spain, the Catholic church hubristically authorized the division of the Western Hemisphere (the Americas) between Portugal and Spain with the Inter Caetera papal bull of 1493 and the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494. In a 1630 lay sermon, John Winthrop, who governed the Massachusetts Bay Company, promulgated the notion that God covenanted—if you believe in a God—the Puritan colony as an exceptional City Upon the Hill. Ipso facto, the colonists and the people of the United States, as subsequently reprised by President Ronald Reagan in his 1989 Farewell speech, believed in a chauvinist mission to reform the world. And like how Aztec imperialist viewed their tribe in Tenochtitlan, Zionists, most of Ashkenazi lineage, view Jews as the chosen people of God; an affirmation for the lethal invasion of Palestine and expulsion of its indigenous Arab majority. Zionists weaponize scripture, in addition to Holocaust history, to contend that the people of the state of Israel possess a “Biblical deed” to the land of Palestine based on the book of Genesis. Forsooth Zionists conflate Judaism with their settler colonial project to deny indigenous Palestinians any right to their land. Zionists also negate the existence of a Palestinian people. According to Amnesty International, the public display of the flag of Palestine in Israel is outlawed. Moreover, the conquest of Palestinian lands is marked by steady Israeli assaults dating back to the late nineteen century, institutionalized in 1948 with the founding of the state of Israel and Nakba by Haganah and Irgun terrorists, and hastened after the Six Day War of 1967. To the present, Israeli settlements in the occupied territories continue in violation of international law as declared by United Nations resolutions. However, the United States government does not recognize this history in the issuance of its hypocritical, morally corrupt propaganda. Protecting its strategic geo-political oil and trade interests in the Middle East by way of the state of Israel is all that matters.

Money talks and all else walks.

Historically, how is nation-state terrorism of empire by the British in India and Ireland, French in Algeria and Vietnam (for this watch the films The Battle of Algiers of 1966 and Indochine of 1992), Spanish throughout Latin America, and the United States in North America, for example, acquiesced to, if not defended, by the citizens, residents, and subjects of these countries? The popular inculcation of national myths portrayed as history by way of textbooks, radio, and television is how. Spain’s Hernán Cortés, destroyed the codices of the Aztecs after 1521 to rewrite Mexico’s cosmology. In the United States, in addition to Winthrop’s City of Upon the Hill screed, journalist John O’Sullivan’s 1845 Manifest Destiny declaration permitted ethnic European (read, white) Americans and immigrants to fanaticize that they enjoyed God’s command to violently conquer Native civilizations and Mexicans of North America by expulsion, the establishment of concentration camps called reservations, and genocide. Forsooth, before the United States assault on Mexico in 1846 to acquire Aztlán—what is today the Spanish-language titled states of Tejas, Arizona, Nuevo Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and California inspired by Sullivan’s vision and realized by the presidency of John K. Polk—President Andrew “Indian Killer” Jackson ethnically cleansed 100,000 Native Seminole, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek from what is today South and North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. The US National Park Service estimates that over 10,000 Native Americans died on this Trail of Tears. Those who survived the forced removal ended up in the moon-like territory of Oklahoma. The US Army killed Natives who resisted. Later the Texas Ranger, aka los rinches, killed Mexicans to drive them off their lands. The state of Israel, it seems, has studied the history of the United States.

With television, children consume the mendacities of hit shows such as Little House on the Prairie (1974-1983) in which the opening credits of each episode farcically depict the covered wagon of the Ingalls family “pioneering” empty plains. From this show and its afterschool syndicated reruns which I maturated through middle school, I internalized Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier (unpeopled land) thesis that contended that the US West defined the exceptional, elected, culture of its citizenry in contrast to quailed Europe. Tropes of the frontier, or empty land for the taking, were complemented by other fantasy TV series and movies such as Bonanza, F Troop, Fort Apache, Gun Smoke, Stagecoach, High Chapparal, True Grit, and The Lone Ranger, to name a few. Each in their own manner indoctrinated viewers with insidious, white supremacist narratives as historical fact.

From my recent study of the Los Angeles Times, I have learned that Israeli television networks similarly make sure that its citizens do not get any sense of the history and experience of Palestinians as this would humanize them. The myth of empire must be preserved. Not historical truths. Otherwise, the lies of settler colonial Zionism would fall apart.

Palestine: A Chicano’s Education Or How I Decided to Educate Myself on Zionism, part 1

 Palestine: 

A Chicano’s Education 

Or 

How I Decided to Educate Myself on Zionism, part 1 

 

   As a Chicano who lives in the historically conquered territory of the Southwest after the US attack on Mexico in 1846 and who lives in the state of California that systematically dispossessed indigenous peoples of their land and relegated them to lives in concentration camps known as reservations, I identify with the Palestinian struggle for national liberation. Hence, I refuse to abet via silence the continued catastrophe, Nakba, of ethnic cleansing against the people of Palestine perpetuated since 1948 by the United States-backed state of Israel.[i] This moral stand arose from witnessing the brazenly decontextualized propaganda of commercial network news streamed to my television since October 7, 2023. Indeed, I have yet to view corporate news functionaries addressing the fundamental causes of Zionist invasion, racial apartheid, and theft of Palestinian territories even before the mid-twentieth century that induced Hamas’ recent attack on Israelis and the taking of hostages. 

    Furthermore, US news anchors, posing as objective journalists, fail to provide their audiences with primary statements of Hamas or Palestinian Authority officials; virtually all accounts related to the October 7^th attack originate from biased Israeli government officials and spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces. Then US officials from President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, to Democratic party operative, Senator Alex Padilla, and others pathetically parrot the perspective of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The unverified accounts of Hamas beheading Israeli babies echoed by President Biden being one example. 

    To paraphrase the late eminent scholar Edward W. Said, everyone speaks for Palestinians except Palestinians.[ii] 

    When US propaganda television news presents the perspective of Palestinians it is restricted to the severe suffering of Gaza civilian women, children, and men of all ages having been mercilessly and collectively punished by IDF with US bombs and tanks that level entire urban districts, hospitals, refugee camps, and schools. I have yet to view the commercial media report on Palestinian resistance presenting them as valiant human agents not solely powerless victims of IDF domination. 

    Thus far, IDF attacks have killed 24,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Of them, over 11,000 children, 7,000 women, and 1,000 senior citizens; or 75% of the total number of Palestinian casualties. This number steadily increases, not counting deaths in other territories under Israeli military siege and occupation (such as the Golan Heights and West Bank) in violation of United Nations resolutions 194, 242, 338, and 465. According to a December 15, 2023, report by France 24, October 7^th Israeli deaths “is now thought to be 695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners, giving a total of 1,139.”[iii] Therefore, Palestinian lives lost caused by IDF are greatly disproportionate to the estimated lives lost of Israelis and other people by Hamas on October 7, by a ratio of over 20:1. 

    To lessen my ignorance on the question of Palestine and fathom the reasons why Hamas would dare challenge the Israeli government that enjoys an extraordinarily superior military largely supplied with state-of-the-art US weaponry and financing in the billions of dollars annually, I lately studied, in the consequent order, books authored by Richard Becker, Jimmy Carter, Rashid Khalidi, respectively titled Palestine: Israel and the U.S. Empire (2009), Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006), and The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020). I currently started Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006). Moreover, I seek out and read the latest articles in the Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker focused on the experience of Palestinians and Jews before and since the United Nations partition of Palestine in 1947 that led to the violent creation of the state of Israel the next year that, in the words of Pappe, “led to one of the largest forced migrations in modern history. Around a million people were expelled from their homes at gunpoint, civilians were massacred, and hundreds of Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed.” I also learned that Palestine’s partition after WWII was sponsored by Britain, the archetype colonial power in rapid decline, and subsequently advanced by the number one global empire, the United States. I augmented this self-study with enlightening social media video clips that feature the informed views of people in opposition to Zionism such as Angela Davis, Norman Finkelstein, Nelson Mandela, and Gabriel Mate. 

    This initial investigation also encompassed conversations with colleagues and people in my social network, as well as attending community forums and demonstrations. Over time I came to understand the effective ways in which a highly tuned Israeli public relations campaign—with the support of influential allies such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—has defined the dominant narrative imbibed by the US public, particularly those of the Great Depression and Baby Boom generations. Myths, misinformation, and outright lies portray Palestinians as fanatical terrorists who irrationally attack Israelis, and Zionists, on the other hand, essentially, as neutral, and innocent defenders of Israel’s security. People who do not have the luxury to devote time to independently learn the historical realities of the Palestinian experience are left to rely upon pro-Israel propaganda proliferated by US television “news,” with no recognition of causation. 

    In this regard, US stories on events in the Middle East are a modern-day production of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. But people of all generations, internationally, and from all walks of life, are learning alternative perspectives via social media.

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[i] Other Western nations with ruthless imperial histories, as if there were any other kind, that back Israel are Britain, France, and Germany to name a few. 

[ii] Said’s more popularly well-known books are Orientalism (1978) and The Question of Palestine (1979). 

[iii] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231215-israel-social-security-data-reveals-true-picture-of-oct-7-deaths 

Book Review of Law & Disorder: Confessions of a District Attorney

Law & Disorder: Confessions of a District Attorney (Authorized 2023 Edition) by Michael Bradbury memorializes his thirty-plus year career as a Ventura County prosecutor, twenty-four as the elected boss of that office. “Disorder” and “Confessions” in the title aptly suggest a legal vocation within a mise-en-scene of chaos and turpitude reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction film. The protagonists, however, are not felonious actors; they are functionaries of the legal system. In this regard, the author details the corrupt acts of judges to cops, who commit adultery, gratuitous violence, dubiously extract confessions, and cover up the sins of their own whenever possible in the pursuit of serial rapists, thieves, and psychopathic killers. The circumvention of the law by people charged to enforce it blurs an imaginary thin line that separates order and madness. For example, Bradbury (and his ghost-writer as he uses the first-person plural) chronicles stories from the point of view of a person dedicated to the discretionary prosecution of offenders, while brazenly admitting how “Oldtimer” officers of the past experienced little to no institutional training and conducted their duties with above-the-law impunity while they mentored newer colleagues.

Bradbury’s Manichean narrative also provides readers with an insight into the mentalité of a prosecutor who imagined himself a cowboy sheriff. A Rooster Cogburn of True Grit if you will. The book states as much and features images of the author costumed as a cowboy at his “HANG ‘EM HIGH” ranch. In this Louis L’Amour-styled narrative, few angels exist on either side of the law as scrupulous cops, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges regularly close their eyes when their colleagues do wrong. Indeed, the author confesses how honest cops and prosecutors dared not break a code of silence that protected their own from being indicted for in flagrante delictos of drunk driving, enhanced interrogations, and the gratuitous use of force on people deemed the “bad guys.”

For example, when a handcuffed narco-trafficker, named Batista, resisted humiliation, Oxnard police officers took turns meting out abuse with the butts of their shotguns until he collapsed into unconscious submission. And when Ron Liesse, a young Ventura police department detective, followed his conscience to testify in a state attorney general investigation against coworkers suspected of a botched premeditated assassination attempt of a serial burglar, he was so ostracized by his department peers he committed suicide.

In both instances, Bradbury did not break the code of silence.

As to the rights of the accused, if the author had his way, he would abolish bothersome Miranda and other Bill of Rights protections. And he is particularly critical of judges as he views them as generally lenient and overly concerned with the rights of defendants. Even though a healthy number of judges historically graduate from the ranks of prosecutors.

Throughout his confessions, the author pruriently objectifies women. It is as though he is trapped in a time warp when such lurid sexism was acceptable as part of a boys-will-be-boys culture. Bradbury, moreover, describes how judges habitually engaged in sex trafficking, dated grand jury members, and encouraged male lawyers to select women jurors deemed attractive for them to ogle during trials. And there is the affair of two Thousand Oaks detective partners, Teddy and Leah, married to different people, who completed one of their regular assignations while on a stakeout of a drug dealer, Raul Mendoza, only to be inadvertently audio recorded and listened to later by prosecutors in the preparation of evidence against the suspect. To avoid exposing the two detectives’ sexual relations, Bradbury delayed the case’s prosecution. Ultimately, the author dropped the charges against Mendoza as he was convicted in Arizona for drug dealing and sentenced to 10 years in prison. So, the affair of the two detectives—one married to an LAPD lieutenant and the other whose wife recently delivered a baby at the time— remained a secret until the publication of this book.

Bradbury contends that the stories in his book are factual and accurate. If so, they are not complete. I was alerted to factual omissions made in Bradbury’s book by Moses Mora (a Native of Ventura, US Army Vietnam Veteran, and social justice activist) concerning chapter Eight on the case of Paul Skyhorse and Richard Mohawk, Native persons who were members of the American Indian Movement (AIM). Wanting to learn of the nexus of the Chicano movement in Ventura County with Native Americans, I interviewed Mora and compared Bradbury’s book with the existing literature on the subject. I also attended a May 3rd conversation between current District Attorney Erik Nasarenko and Michael Bradbury on the book before a standing-room audience at the Museum of Ventura County. Although the two did not discuss the Skyhorse and Mohawk case at the event, Bradbury did highlight several of the stories featured in this review and others with a similar tendency and concupiscence.

Nevertheless, in 1974, the Ventura County DA charged Skyhorse and Mohawk with the October 10, 1974 murder of cab driver George Aird at Box Canyon near Simi Valley. Bradbury argues with vexation that Skyhorse and Mohawk, initially representing themselves, effectively stalled the case with pre-trial motions in order so the prosecution’s key witness, Maruffo, diagnosed with brain cancer would transition before being able to testify against them. Lasting nearly four years, the case was ultimately moved from Ventura County upon the motion of the defendants. While Skyhorse and Mohawk believed they could not get a fair trial in Ventura County, Bradbury indignantly contends that the defendants wanted the move because not guilty verdicts were more likely in Los Angeles due to court juries there being filled from pools of “dregs” and the “flea-bitten."

What Bradbury omits from his account, however, is that the trial was changed to Los Angeles after the defendants proved that at a March 1977 Ventura County Bar Association dinner, with the presiding judge and prosecutor in attendance, several attorneys performed an act titled “The People vs. Tonto” that mocked the case’s protracted pre-trial motions. Michael Leroy Oberg, a distinguished professor of history at the State University of New York-Genesco, states in an electronic essay titled The Murder Trial of Richard Billings Mohawk and Paul Durant Skyhorse “This poorly-thought out bit of racist humor—acted out as AIM activists protested outside—made it seem clear to many that the proceedings could not continue in Ventura County. The California Bar Association called for a change of venue, which was granted.”

Bradbury also omits the fact that Holly Broussard, Marvin Red Shirt, and Marcella Eagle Staff hijacked Aird’s cab on their way back to Box Canyon on the day of the murder. Upon their arrest, all three had Aird’s blood on their clothes; Eagle Staff had the key to the cab in her pants. No physical evidence implicated Skyhorse or Mohawk nor were they in the cab. Accordingly, the Ventura County DA charged the three with the kidnapping, robbery, and murder of Aird. The counts against them were subsequently reduced after they agreed to testify against Skyhorse and Mohawk. The prosecution’s case eventually crumbled not because Maruffo died from cancer before he could testify in court but due to Broussard, Red Shirt, Eagle Staff, and other witnesses such as Carmen Fish and Skyhorse’s spouse Marilyn recanting their statements. Prosecution witnesses Broussard, Eagle Staff, and Marilyn Skyhorse testified in court that they made their initial statements under the duress of law enforcement. Red Shirt further undermined the prosecution’s case when he testified on the witness stand while severely intoxicated—to the point that the presiding judge was baffled how Red Shirt remained upright—as well as contradicting statements he made before the trial. But Bradbury does not make mention of this.

Bradbury does write about the close involvement of the FBI via informants, operatives, and agent provocateurs in the case. A point that the judge of the case would not allow the defense to introduce. This was important as Skyhorse and Mohawk argued that they were framed by the FBI to smear the legitimacy of AIM as part of its neutralization of the organization’s human and civil rights struggles, and probably more importantly cutting off the philanthropy of its supporters. Mora, who worked for the Skyhorse and Mohawk defense, asks the trenchant question who in the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office decided to reduce the murder charges against Broussard, Red Shirt, and Eagle Staff to convict Skyhorse and Mohawk? This is a crucial question as the COINTEL program of the FBI sought to “neutralize” (read destroy) the social justice movements of not only AIM but also Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Chicanos like the Brown Berets, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and women’s movements in different parts of the country during the 1960s and ’70s under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, a person Bradbury idolizes.

Law & Disorder is an essential book for persons interested in the character and operations of our criminal justice system, despite the often superficial and partial way Bradbury details them. As there are many sides to a story beyond those of a prosecutor. The author also fails to interrogate points of ambiguity as he did about abortion cases he was charged with in 1967 and the vile conduct of one of his deputy DA colleagues. Furthermore, Bradbury refuses to recognize his complicity in undermining the integrity of the administration of justice when he details how he stood by when his peers blatantly broke the law or engaged in unethical acts. This is particularly critical when he expresses a binary worldview defined by “good guys” or “good cops” versus “the bad guys” while not recognizing the existence of “bad cops.” Former Governor Pete Wilson, in writing the forward of the book, recognizes this ambiguity when he states “It [Law & Disorder] teaches us more about human nature than the finer points of criminal law.” Hence, people in law enforcement can be as extremely human as the criminal suspects they chase.

In conclusion, although the author comments in passing on chauvinistic policing in two parts of his book, he completely shies away from discussing race as the central source of historical antagonism of Black and Brown people with white-dominated agencies of law enforcement. This is a critical, accurate, and factual omission on the part of the author. As a result, I recommend this book to be read with ruthless criticism.

C/S

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Chicano Moratoriums: The East Los Angeles-Ventura County Connection

It was on its way to being a completely wonderful Saturday. August 29, 1970.

People from barrio communities and ag towns throughout the West—Denver, Colorado; San Antonio, Texas; Seattle, Washington to nearby cities in Ventura County like Oxnard and Santa Paula—journeyed to East Los Angeles to participate in another Chicano Moratorium, of a scheduled series, demanding the end to the US war in Vietnam.

(National Chicano Moratorium march down Whittier Blvd. in East Los Angeles, August 29, 1970. Source: Los Angeles Public Library)

Ethnic Mexican sons, brothers, boyfriends, and husbands had died there disproportionately (20 percent) to their number in the Southwest (14 percent), stated a 1968 report by political scientist Ralph Guzman.

But this was just one data point of a web of racist-classist oppressions that ethnic Mexicans in the US endured. Like the true believers who followed César Chávez from Delano, California to Sacramento in 1966 to shed public light on the farming industry’s exploitation of workers and the students who walked out of East Los Angeles high schools with moxie in 1968 to demand an equal education, politicized ethnic Mexicans and their allies that summer day similarly took over streets to also demand an end to incessant police brutality in their communities and a school pushout rate that exceeded 50 percent making youth particularly susceptible to the draft and lowered life chances.

Furthermore, demonstrators, many of whom embraced the Chicana/o epithet, viewed the event as more than a protest. It was also a parade celebrating the splendor of their culture by way of comity, song, and dance.

To support the petition of grievances of their daughters and sons, parents attended the event with their younger offspring in tow.

La Raza (the hoi polloi) came alive with bilingual chants. As the pageant from Belvedere Park down Whittier Boulevard concluded at Laguna Park (later renamed Salazar Park), families rested in front of a stage to heed militant speeches and delight conjunto music as grade school-aged girls danced wearing colorful folclórico dresses and coiffed hair with matching ribbons.

As educator Sal Castro lachrymosely declared after the student walkouts two years before, it was a beautiful day to be a Chicano!

Then Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies violated the convivencia as they pursued liquor store robbery suspects. At the park they found themselves pelted with bottles and rocks—not an unusual scene in communities that regularly suffered indignities and the lethal abuse of law enforcement. Witness Maria del Socorro Urias Muñoz, mother of Rosalio Muñoz, chairman of the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, commented decades later, “The sheriff had no business coming into that park.”

But Chicano resistance would not be allowed to pass unrequited. So, the embattled deputies called in backup. After which, they stormed the park mercilessly rocking people with their batons and teargassing men, women, children, the elderly, and even a wheelchair-bound person.

Consequently, over one hundred were arrested, many wounded, and three persons would die: Lyn Ward, Angel Gilberto Díaz, and Ruben Salazar, the martyred Los Angeles Times columnist and KMEX news director considered by fans as the intrepid voice of the ethnic Mexican community.

Not to be intimidated, the NCMC and autonomous like-groups such as one in Oxnard vowed to move forward with their planned demonstrations to maintain and expand the power of their movement.

In fact, the stomping of Chicano activism on August 29th galvanized El Movimiento. Hunter S. Thompson shrewdly contended in Rolling Stone Magazine the next year that the homicide of Salazar by deputy sheriff Thomas Wilson at the Silver Dollar bar after the disruption of the peaceful assembly at Laguna Park transformed conformist ethnic Mexicans. He wrote, “Middle-aged housewives who had never thought of themselves as anything but lame-status ‘Mexican Americans’ just trying to get by in a mean Gringo world they never made suddenly found themselves shouting ‘Viva La Raza’ in public. And their husbands—quiet Safeway clerks and lawn-care salesmen, the lowest and most expendable cadres in the Great Gabacho economic machine—were…[now] calling themselves Chicanos.”

(Oxnard La Raza Moratorium, September 19, 1970, demonstration flyer. Created by Alberto Ordoñez. Source flickr.com)

Three weeks after the tragedy at Laguna Park a Chicano Moratorium demonstration billed emphatically as a peace march took place in Oxnard on September 19. An estimated one to three thousand marchers from all walks of life, places, and a span of generations came together to again claim the streets. From La Virgin de Guadalupe Church, demonstrators paraded through La Colonia, the city’s version of East LA, and the downtown district with a coffin representing ethnic Mexican servicemen killed in Vietnam.

Former Brown Beret Peggy Larios of the city of Ventura recalled elders of her community defiantly marching with her. Hence, for this moment, no matter their generational designation and citizenship, they were all Chicanas and Chicanos.

The procession concluded at the Oxnard Community Center with poetry, music, dance, and speeches. Rosalio Muñoz spoke characterizing the war as the “systematic murder” of Chicanos.

(Rosalio Muñoz speaking, Ventura Star-Free Press, Septemper 20, 1970)

Before the peace march, men and women of the Oxnard Brown Berets leafleted Ventura County neighborhoods. Roberto Flores, a UCLA classmate of Muñoz, and other organizers trained monitors to avoid a catastrophe such as had occurred on August 29th. To this end, the Berets and MEChA students from the community colleges of Moorpark and Ventura as well as high school youth conferred with Oxnard Police Department chief Robert Owen and circulated a code of conduct to the media.

The Moratorium Committee’s dialogue with law enforcement and a public relations campaign garnered goodwill in the community. Indeed, the Oxnard Press-Courier commended the organizers in an editorial, in which it acknowledged the disproportionate ethnic Mexican casualty rate. It also praised, in a backhanded manner, the police for its “diplomacy and restraint” leading up to and during the march.

Chicano Moratorium commemorations continue today in communities in and out of East Los Angeles as they mark a history that centers on the experience of ethnic Mexican and Latinx peoples in the US to inspire and reinspire the young and old, respectively, to continue their struggle to realize the ideal of justice for all.

C/S
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TROPICS OF META, HISTORY NEWS NETWORK,

An Encomium for Carmen

 At the close of Teatro Campesino’s 1972 film “Los Vendidos/The Sellouts,” originally a play written by Luis Valdez, a menagerie of stereotyped ethnic Mexicans — e.g., an “esa” and a pachuco cruising in a classic 1950s-era Fleetline, a Frito Bandito-like Mexican revolutionary, a monolingual Spanish-speaking housewife who serves her viejo Kool-Aid, campus militants, and a Spanish conquistador — gather around Luis’s character, a somnolent “Mexican peon.”

Before the final scene, Ms. Jimenez (who stressed her Anglicized surname as “Ms. Gym-eh-Nez,” as opposed to “Hee-meh-nez”), a factotum from the governor’s office, presumably of California, procured a Chicano, named Eric (not Kiki, the endearing cognomen used by his peers) whose assignment was to masquerade as a business attired, college-educated, fluently bilingual, “made in the U.S.A,” Mexican-American. 

After attaining the attention of the cast, who moaned and stretched from their fixed poses, Luis lays out a map on the floor of Honest Sanchos Used Mexican Shop. Then he pointed out, “We got Chicanos infiltrated in every urban center in the U.S.: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, New York, Washington, Rumford, Maine.” 

Yes. Even in Rumford, Maine! 

For me, Ventura County Supervisor Carmen Ramirez was such a Chicana who had infiltrated the power structure of landed dynastic families and capitalist interests to fight on behalf of our community — ethnic Mexicans and other historically underserved peoples that included lumpen proletariat, poor whites — on various boards, councils, and bodies dominated by male and female Anglos.

As an educator succinctly memorialized on social media, Carmen was “our champion” as we knew she was watching out for us — La Raza/the people. 

As the daughter of a WWII US Army veteran, our querida Carmen grew up in the East Los Angeles community of Pico Rivera and came of age during the fervor of El Movimiento Chicana/o. She navigated circles of renowned groups and figures of that time. One included Oscar Zeta Acosta (aka the Brown Buffalo); the once assimilated, self-loathing Mexican American who worked as a legal-aid attorney in Los Angeles only to find himself caught up in the zeitgeist of the late 1960s and ’70s. 

Carmen also was well connected to civil rights activists like Alice Greenfield McGrath, the once executive secretary of the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee as well as United Farm Workers movement organizers, ascending and arrived politicians, and the intelligentsia. 

After her education at Cal State LA, Carmen was admitted to Loyola Law School after Acosta, Los Católicos Por La Raza, and Chicana/o regulars jammed up Cardinal James McIntyre and the archdiocese in 1969 for its hubristic institutional neglect of the needs of the ethnic Mexican community. Carmen understood that the militantly-righteous trouble of El Movimiento had busted open doors to improve the life chances of los de abajo, the hoi polloi, of our society and that she was one of its beneficiaries.

Hence, she paid forward this obligation with sophistication as a citizen-professional in solidarity with her community. 

As a politician, however, Carmen did not publicly pronounce her Chicana identity as it would have been unwise to do so. But her friends knew she was a nueva Chicana as she cunningly demonstrated, without fail, a commitment to advancing the interest of the underdogs. As I write, I am reminded of her fierce defense of her people as a private citizen and elected official against gas, electric, and oil companies who dared not contaminate or compromise the safety of more affluent, whiter communities with their ventures, but for them poor, predominantly brown areas were open game. 

And knowing that education was a weighty mace against such injustice, over the past twenty years Carmen committed herself to California State University Channel Islands’ development, even before the appointment of its earliest tenure-track faculty starting in 2001.  

I got to know Carmen when she was a member of the university’s community advisory committee. As she did as an Oxnard councilmember, Mayor Pro Tem, and county supervisor, she made certain, in her signature diplomatic yet powerfully measured manner that Ventura County’s only public university would have a faculty, curriculum, and programs that equitably served and reflected the interests of the demographic makeup of its service area. 

For example, in 2005, when presumptuous functionaries of CSU Channel Islands decided to strike the BA degree in Chicana/o Studies from its academic master plan, Carmen attended a campus conversation of administrators, students, staff, and faculty. After listening to the views in support of Chicana/o Studies and others for a milquetoast multicultural program, Carmen spoke.

With a poetic equanimity, she asked, as a CSU alum, why this was an issue when just about every campus in the system had Chicana/o Studies. This was a huge intervention that aided Chicana/o Studies' ultimate institution. 

Later, Carmen would attend events of CSU Channel Islands’ Chicana/o Studies Department: an open house, exhibits, lectures, and ceremonies. From afar, I often viewed her classically warm smile as she basked in the glory of the history and culture of her community. 

Thank you, Carmen, for being a Chicana infiltrator in many positions of power.

C/S

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VC STAR, 

El Calor de Otro Sol Or: The Sneetches, Part II

“Frank. NEVER trust an Anglo.” That was the steely admonition of John. A Chicano, WWII US Navy veteran who took advantage of his G.I. Bill benefits to earn a college degree and purchase a Levittown-styled home in the southside of Chiques. Then as an Oxnard firefighter, he scaled the ranks to assistant chief. But before his training he sued his future employer because the outfit’s arbitrary height requirement, which he could not meet, had nothing to do with his ability, or that of other applicants of his stature, to perform the job. 

As I absorbed his directive with concentration, I thought to myself, “They [whites] aren’t all bad.” Why I grew up with a good number of them. Moreover, the best man at my wedding, Cody, was a white guy, one of the last americanos who lived in Mission Hills just across the way from San Fernando High. To this day, if I’d ever find myself in a jam or life-cycle moment, Cody tops the list of brothers to call. So, I trust him.

Then there are the Anglo teachers, coaches, advisors, and bosses—many of the Jewish persuasion—that treated me all right.

Nonetheless, I periodically ponder John’s counsel. Because there is a complexity behind it. In my research for Curious Unions and subsequent casual conversations we had as friends, John shared how one of his Anglo superiors worked to diversify Oxnard’s monochrome fire department. Conversely, he also relayed a weariness toward the city’s police, a force made up of largely white officers for much of the twentieth century. One story entailed how when he lived next to the city’s jail on A street as a boy, he often heeded the screams of tortured inmates.

Although I am conflicted about not trusting people of any demographic solely because of the society from which they belong, I understand where John (RIP) was coming from. As a person of the Mexican American Generation who came of age roughly between the years of the Great Depression and the Korean War, he and his cohort of Brown ethnics lived an in-your-face, apartheid-like reality much like that conveyed in the movie GIANT. Whites, the rich, kind of rich, and the hardscrabble class, like the uncouth Jett Rink, called the shots at the workplace, in government, and public spaces. And as Bick Benedict’s sister Luz did on screen, they barked orders at their “Mexicans.” Hence, an Anglo dictatorship viewed ethnic Mexicans, as a subordinate people created inferiorly by God—if there is one—to serve them. Los gueros also Orientalized, to use Edward Said’s definition, ethnic Mexicans as a generalized, static, and backward people—at best, when not selling drugs and violating women.

Therefore, John and his generation, as well as politicized Chicanas and Chicanos of mine, understood how white Orientalists fantasized Oriental representations of ethnic Mexicans in stereotypical ways, often with a presumptuous noblesse oblige, to materially privilege their tribe legally, economically, and spatially. To undergird their power further, Orientalists fabricated and inculcated a steady stream of myths, dishonestly packaged as history, to students and the public by way of fiction and film. The stinking badges scene in Humphrey Bogart’s 1948 movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre comes to mind.

This settler colonialist “history” replete with lies and omissions centers white protagonists as nation saviors, redeemers, heroes, founders, and pioneers. I internalized this worldview in watching John Wayne movies of the Stagecoach, The Alamo, and the particularly laughable and offensive The Green Berets kind. Ethnic Mexicans, Native Americans, Blacks, and Asian characters, when recognized on the page or big screen, were depicted as marginal in Easy Rider, inarticulate like The Lone Ranger’s Tonto, and obsequious as Hop Sing in Bonanza.

Orientalists dictate representations. This is how power, and supremacy, work. It’s coded, not so subliminally, and normalized. This is why the lions must have their historians, as Chinua Achebe submits, so the glory of the hunt will not always be attributed to the hunter.

As I have aged, I more fully understand John’s wisdom. He lived in a societal system where Anglos were always the hunters and had been betrayed by them more than once, I’m sure.

As an educator, I have seen hunter, settler colonial, Orientalist forces in play, especially in the institution of curriculum (i.e., histories) as well as academe’s selection of the next generation of storytellers. For example, hunter Anglo tenure-track faculty, a numerical minority at my campus, California State University Channel Islands, exercise their supremacy in the formulation of courses and capricious criteria that privilege different sub-groups of their larger tribe while systemically disadvantaging Chicanas/os and other lions from historically underrepresented groups (HUGs).

A white professorate who dominates the ranks of the tenure-track faculty has authored courses that are essentially culturally irrelevant to the glories of Chicanas/os, Blacks, Indigenous, and ethnic Asian students. Indeed, centering the campus’s curriculum on the epistemologies of Chicanas/os and other HUGs students is unimaginable not only to most, if not all, Anglo faculty but also lion educators whose minds have been colonized by WASP knowledge systems. Unless learned in the departments of Chicana/o, Africana, Indigenous, and Asian American Studies, the epistemologies, cosmologies, and ontologies of peoples of color are never at the center of learning, if learned about at all…much like in the movies.

Oppressively Eurocentric hunter histories in the form of curriculum then serve as the required and preferred criteria of tenure-track job announcements tooled by settler colonial professors, often recent pilgrims from Northern, Southern, and Midwestern regions of the US with little to no consideration of the cultural capital of people of color. What they know of Chicanas/os, Blacks, Indigenous, and ethnic Asian American peoples is superficial at best. If they are experts in an area of study, they are prone to employ, as Said posits, Orientalist perspectives. Then this ruling class of faculty dominate search committees, like jurists in a courtroom trial, to select the next generation of colleagues that are racial reflections of themselves. The chosen often are ol’ boy and ol’ gal peers of graduate school and professional conferences. More insidiously, over the years, I have exposed job announcements patterned after the resumes of favored white applicants.

Furthermore, before the last five years, my university conducted a tenure-track recruitment process that was centralized. After two preliminary screenings, this entailed interdisciplinary search committees inviting three, sometimes four, candidates to interview on campus. As part of the recruitment of new tenure-track colleagues, existing Orientalist faculty mouthed rhetoric about the importance of diversity. Naively, wanting to be accepted, I trusted my Anglo faculty colleagues as I liked them and, I think, they liked me, for the most part, especially as I did not rock the campus boat at that time.

Then, circa 2009, a colleague in Chicana/o Studies pointed out to me that most academic departments across campus failed to invite HUGs applicants to interview on campus. And the few that did arrive were ultimately rejected. As I write this story, viscerally I am reliving the punch-in-the-gut emotion of betrayal when I awakened to the fact that most of my white colleagues spoke with forked tongues. They hired their own as this was where their tribal loyalty existed.

The intervention by my Chicana/o Studies colleague compelled me to think back to one ethnic Mexican candidate named Luis who interviewed on campus for a position in the Education department. As the recruitment process back then encouraged all professors, students, staff, community members, and administrators to observe the teaching demonstrations of candidates, I sat in Luis’ presentation as he was not only an ethnic Mexican but also trained at the Claremont Graduate University as I was. He lectured on the consequence of Paulo Freire’s learning theories and culturally relevant education for HUGs students.

After an analysis of Dr. Seuss’s book, The Sneetches, Luis described how our nation’s elementary schools debilitated the learning of ethnic Mexican grade-schoolers, both the US-born and migrant, by the ablation of cultural support systems. To prove his point, Luis broke down how entrusting parents escorted their children to their first days of school with mochilas metaphorically complete with the assets to communicate in both English and Spanish, knowledge of their rich history, and a strong identity of who they were. Straightaway, however, teachers at the classroom door seized from the mochilas of students these powers. Furthermore, schools grounded in a WASP settler colonial tradition did not celebrate or inculcate the danza, musica, and holiday traditions of the community they served. School systems, hence, excised the cultural connective tissue of chicanita y chicanito students, severely disabling their learning readiness from day one.

For young ethnic Mexican children to excel academically it behooved educators to embrace and center the cultural capital of language, history, and community of these students. As I account in Mexican Americans with Moxie, during the Chicano Movement, the Brown Berets of Oxnard understood this by staging a pedagogical intervention with the administrators and teachers of the Oxnard School District in the late 1960s. They pointed out to district officials that it was the teachers that were deficient, not the students. The Brown Berets then ran a tutorial program that centered a curriculum of the community, by the community, and for the community as an amour propre served as the foundation for learning excellence. A half century later, this model is mandated in California state law for high schools, community colleges, and universities as Ethnic Studies.

I was blown back by Luis’ lecture. He was perfect for the position. A shoe in, I thought. But disappointedly, I never saw him again. Another white candidate became my colleague instead.

No matter. The struggle continues.

All, however, is not so bleak. Incremental, steady progress is being made in the diversification of the tenure-track faculty with the support of white allies who get it, so to speak, and who wish not to play the role of an Orientalist. They are ok with supporting Chicana/os and other people of color centering their experience and expertise in the further development of a university that serves the needs of a student population of the 21st century.

And for this, I hold qualified trust as there still remain academic departments, despite their empty liberal rhetoric of inclusion, at CSU Channel Islands that have no Chicanas or Chicanos as tenure-track faculty.

C/S

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